


Time Runner

by lalalive



Series: Time Runner [1]
Category: Muse (Band)
Genre: Historical, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Science Fiction, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:52:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4046740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalive/pseuds/lalalive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt Bellamy is a 21 year old university student who is fascinated by history. One day, he meets Dominic Howard who is running from, and through, space and time. Matt gets wrapped up in his escape, and is forced to learn about life, death, and love in a non-linear progression.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some creative license has been taken with the historical locations, most notable the references surrounding the Inquisition. The time and the place are accurate, however it is before the siege and capture of Granada and, therefore, the death toll has been adjusted to suit my needs.

**18 March, 2013  
London, England**

It never escaped my awareness that, in old university libraries, it was incredibly easy to confuse the act of learning with the smell of rotting wood, damp stone, and the musk of old leather. Touching a book felt like touching history, an original publication of parchment and ink, and the temporality of my own life’s timeline had crossed backwards into some decade before my parents were even born. I held the history of the world in my hands, but what had I learned? Had I bothered to remember the words of Lyotard’s Analytics of the Sublime rather than imagine the desk upon which he scratched his unruly French? Could I argue, at any point in my future, for or against Jameson’s theory of the Postmodern Condition? No, of course I couldn’t, but I could speak at length about the way the binding left streaks of dust on my fingers, and how the library in which I sat smelled distinctly of nostalgia and cedar. 

Distraction came easily to me in the campus library, regardless if I locked myself in one of the study cubes or climbed high into the post-graduate tower, near the old cathedral clock. Everything was a contradiction, new carpet with old stained glass windows. The building was too beautiful to look away from. Naturally, my midterm paper remained untouched. The open word doc had blinked its cursor at me so many times, the solid black line had become frozen in place. I had little patience for an essay on Semiotics, Intertexuality, and Proust, not in such silence, not when the building I was in had become a church. 

As I leaned back in my chair, the wood creaking in protest, my eyes scoured the many levels above me. Stacks and stacks of books, waiting to be touched, held and opened. It was simply pornographic, how brazenly their spines waited to be caressed. 

But that was when I saw him. Running out of the corner of my eye, above me, a flutter of black and gold that shimmered brilliantly before it disappeared behind a shelf, another shelf, and finally a door. He was an out of place apparition and my feet began to move toward the breeze he left behind, abandoning my things and climbing stairs, before my mind had given its consent. 

He moved between shelves, running as though he was using the wind to carry him forward. It took me several minutes, standing in the aisle between East Asian Literature and French Poetry, to keep track of him. He was a smear of blond hair and black clothing, the sound of his boots against the floor the only thing I could properly track. Behind me, around me, he was everywhere at once, until suddenly a hand gripped my wrist and pulled me towards a shelf and I stumbled forward into his chest.

Holding my face between his hands, he looked at me as though he were tearing through me, eyes frantic and searching as though he needed me to explain something to him, but didn’t want me to speak at all. Everything about him was wild, panic set into his jaw like steel, lines of his face standing proud beneath the harsh fluorescent light.

‘What are you doing?’ he breathed.

The softness in his voice confused me more than his entire presence, gun - unlike any gun I’d ever seen - slung to his hip, black fatigues, and glass on his forearm. There was kindness behind the rage in his eyes, a kindness that broke through his fear and masked concern over his discontent. 

‘When are you…?’ My words drifted into nothingness. 

I couldn’t place him, couldn’t place him anywhere on the map of history or geography, his very existence an anomaly of paradox. The longer I looked at him, the more I burned the lines of his jaw and the soft white of the hair around his ears into my memory, it became clear the only answer was the he was born of my imagination, born from nowhere and nowhen just for my hands, my eyes, my lips. 

When he looked at me, grey irises storming, it felt like fire in my veins - my safety, my life depended on obeying his every wish.

‘When I tell you to run, run.’

He said the words as though they were a command, as if there was no question I wouldn’t run with him - no question he didn’t want to keep running without me next to him. And maybe I should have refused, perhaps I should have demanded more information, an explanation of who or what we would be running from, but I would never accuse him of manipulating me into escape because I wanted to run, I needed to see for myself. I wanted to run head first for the answers and grab them, wanted to race toward self-discovery with a stranger whose hand felt too strong to be considered ordinary. 

A long, gloved finger came to rest over his lips as he turned around to peek through the open space between the books and the shelf, and I followed suit, too curious to stand still. 

Two men, suited in clothes that seemed too tight and too formal to even bear the pretence of unimportance, of sheer danger, stood side by side in the middle of the floor. Visors covered their eyes, the cold metal matching the sharpness of their features. They were fierce things to behold, large and muscular, violence running from their shoulders to their clenched fists. I scanned the rest of the room, wondering why no one else seemed to question their presence. I couldn’t tell if I were dreaming or if I had somehow become privy to a visions meant only for me.

Next to me, I felt my stranger turn back and set his breathing. No large exhale followed his sharp intake of breath, just an overwhelming calm that settled deep into his shoulder blades. He’d done this before. He was ready to do it again.

‘Did you hear me, Matt?’ he whispered, not bothering to look at me. ‘You run.’ 

I opened my mouth to protest, prepared to step back and scream my questions, but he fixed me with a gaze that held nothing but a smirk that said he knew I was ready for this, a smirk so beautiful I silenced my voice and offered myself to whim.

And when he peered around the edge of the bookcase, when his grip on my fingers tightened and my breathing halted halfway between my lungs and my parted lips, the word fell from his mouth in a shout and suddenly I didn’t care about the students or the half written essay one level beneath my feet. He pulled me beside him without a second thought, and all that mattered was that we kept going, we kept moving. 

Hard footsteps, thudding aggressively against the floor. This was not merely a sprint, it had become a chase. Every second a bullet didn’t penetrate my spine was a victory to be celebrated in safety, a testament to the quickness of our feet and the adrenaline in our veins. 

When whim became chaos, when time slowed and my vision dissolved, I heard myself start to scream. I was pulled and ripped in every direction, but one thing remained constant - his hand in my own.

I kept screaming as my feet touched ground once more.

I screamed as he held a hand over my mouth.

I screamed into the leather until my voice gave out and I bent down, vomiting onto a cobblestoned street, the driver of a horse-drawn carriage passing by without a single care.

**12 June, 1786  
Paris, France**

‘What the fuck is going on?’ I was angry, flushed red with the sheer force of my wrath.

‘You always did ask the right questions,’ he said, holding me against the side of a building with one arm. He’d dragged me down an alley, covered in filth from chamber pots.

‘How do you know who I am.’

‘Start with a different question. I’m as confused about meeting you as you are me.’

‘Tell me your name.’

‘Dominic Howard, ATH-X1200.’

‘What are you?’ I eyed him conspicuously, studying the way the corners of his mouth morphed his expression before he settled on pursed lips. He was picking his words carefully. I didn’t want vague, half truths, I wanted, needed, explicit honesty.

‘I’m an archaeologist.’ 

I cocked an eyebrow. ‘With a gun?’

‘It’s not really -’

‘Stop treading over your words like they’re a landmine!’ I shouted. ‘Tell me what the hell is going on! Five minutes ago I was in a library, and now...what is this? Is this London circa the seventeenth century?’

He narrowed his eyes, and I expected him to scowl. Such an outburst would have silenced anyone, particularly someone who held himself with authority, standing on the balls of his feet as though he would need to run at any second. But he smiled at me like he’d expected worse and I found the brightness on his face positively irritating. ‘It’s the eighteenth century. 1786. And it’s not London...it’s France.’

_‘France?’_

He rolled his eyes and raised his voice to a volume just below mine. ‘Yes! France! It’s not the worst place to be, at least it’s not Neo-Guinea.’ 

‘Where? What are you - why can’t they see us?’ I gesticulated frantically to the street, which was bustling with activity. We were close enough to be seen by anyone and everyone, neither of us talking in whispers or hushed voices. Everything about our very presence in the city screamed exposure, from our conversation to our clothing, but no one offered us a passing glance and the simple fact that no one seemed bothered made me impossibly uneasy.

‘There’s a field around us,’ he said, and I bought my eyes back to him. All light and play had left his face, and suddenly the steel was back in his jaw. ‘We are running through time. The very fact that we are here could rip a hole in the universe.’

I swallowed. ‘And you expect me to just...process this and accept it as if it were an ordinary thing?’

‘No, I expect you to keep running.’ 

I pressed myself against the wall at the darkness in his voice and suppressed a shiver. He was dangerous and beautiful, impossible, and had every potential to be lethal.

I blinked several times and kept going with my questions. Now that I had his attention and the air of privacy, I had to keep going. ‘When are you from?’

‘3418.’

The nonchalance to his answer caught me offguard, his ability to offer numbers that I would never see put together thrilling and terrifying. ‘So in 3418 archaeologists can just...travel through time?’

‘Only if we’re on classified expeditions. If we find something of value in our present, we date the item and go back to see how it worked. Higher ranking specialists can travel at will.’

‘The numbers after your name, then...are your rank?’

‘Precisely.’ He nodded with a smile and the very action made his skin glow. 

‘And you can time travel,’ I said flatly. 

‘Only where this lets me.’

He held up his left hand, finally offering me a detailed view of the glass plate wrapped around his arm. Inside the glass were numbers and lines, all connected to one another. It was colourful and spinning, resembling something of a rotating orb or galaxy, disjointed and uniform all at once. He tapped one finger to the glass and suddenly it became an endless stream of green, blue, and red, numbers and letters opening themselves up into the air, like a hologram, before falling back into the glass in a new pattern. 

‘And this brought us to France.’

‘Yes and no. I’ve hacked the system so I can input the coordinates of where I need to go next.’ He looked down at the plate and his entire form softened as though he were looking at a dear friend. ‘Being an archaeologist isn’t just containing a map of the world, past and present in your mind. You also have to have a map of time. Think of it like an atlas. You put in the longitude and latitude of place and time and this brings you there, but it’s more than that.’ He returned his gaze to mine, wistful and calm. ‘All I have to do is think it, you see? I think of where I want to go in the map and then I’m there.’

‘You talk about that thing like it’s -’

‘My whole world,’ he finished for me. ‘Because it is. The mechanics of history are always there, with me, waiting to be touched and calculated.’ 

Everything was heavy. I closed my eyes and tried to center myself, but the air was wrong. It was messy with things I had never smelled before, not all at once, and I had nothing familiar, nothing truly mine or concrete to grab hold of and remember that this was my life, that this was happening, and real. 

‘Where I’m from, this is impossible,’ I whispered.

‘ _When_ you’re from, anything is possible. That’s the only thing that doesn’t change.’ 

When I opened my eyes again, he was standing in front of me, gaze turning from the back of the alley to the street, on edge. He was waiting to be found, and suddenly I remembered the men who had run after us, violent in every way a person could write aggression into their form. 

‘Why are you running?’

‘Because I’ve taken something,’ he said, still refusing to look at me. 

‘Is that what those men in the visors are after?’ I guessed. 

‘Yes...but they’re after me now, too.’

I furrowed my brow. ‘What did you take?’ 

Finally he returned his eyes to mine, and all that was held within his features, beyond strength and intelligence, was fear. 

‘You said you were an archaeologist. So you took an artifact?’

Still he said nothing. 

‘Tell me what you took.’ I was angry and curious and excited all at once.

‘The key to the weapon that caused the destruction of the world you know.’ 

~~~~~

We ran to the ends of the earth, to a not so distant future and an impossibly distant past. I didn’t know when he’d started to move from holding my hand to kissing my lips but it felt natural, as if I’d always been doing it. He kissed me like he knew what I wanted or needed before I knew myself, came to my mouth like a magnet, connected and practiced, with a force that chemical and kinetic.

Life with him was a vicious education, full of surprises and violence. There was elegance to the terror, a poetry in the destruction of the earth and the arrangement of destroyed cities. We left lovenotes in graffiti on shattered walls, handprints and sweat marks on broken windows. He answered my questions while we ran, with a diligence that occasionally felt unwilling and hesitant. But his answers were the things that held me to him, made me cling to him as though he were to evaporate beneath my hands. 

The very mention of his past, a future that would never belong to me, was jilted and spoken with a weight that always made my chest feel compressed. 

_‘I grew up in a world behind bars, Matt,’ he said. ‘I became an archaeologist to see the life I was missing.’_

_‘The world is a dry and shriveled thing,’ he’d say. ‘I can’t risk taking you too far because it’s a sight no one should have to see.’_

One cold night, in 2042, in a country and a city whose names I had to say three times just to pronounce correctly, I held him close and studied the grey hair that wove itself through yellow, and asked questions that made my stomach twist with acid. 

‘What happens,’ I whispered, ‘if they find you?’ 

‘You don’t understand, Matt. No one is meant to run with the past.’ He spoke like he wanted to laugh and I hated him for his carefree avoidance of my question.

‘What happens?’ My words were clipped and sharp.

‘They’ll execute me.’ There was no pause or hesitation in his speech, simply the dark tone of a man who accepted the fact that he had to keep running in order to keep living. 

‘Why did you take whatever it is you took?’ I’d lost track of how long I’d been running with him, but my hair had grown past my ears and still he hadn’t shown me what he stole.

‘Because I’m selfish.’

I said nothing and waited for him to continue.

‘I thought if I took the key, and could date it, I could stop the destruction from happening at all.’

‘That’s hardly selfish,’ I said, quietly.

‘It’s very selfish,’ he said, sternly. ‘Selfish and stupid.’ 

~~~~~

**18 May, 1484  
Teruel, Kingdom of Aragon, Spain**

He’d dropped us in a terrain unlike any I had ever seen, or would again. The landscape was flush with bright green grass, the Earth rich, the field before us rich and full of wildflowers. A thin dirt path beneath our feet lead towards the center of town, and everything held the potential of being quaint, and beautiful. In any other year, any other season, I would have turned to Dominic and begged him to settle with me there, to bring us back when it was safe to stop running, when the price for his head wasn’t so high, so we could live and die in peace. 

Instead, I dug the nails of my fingers into his gloved hand, clutching him like a cross as the hair on my arm stood on end. The air was thick with iron, poisoned with rot and decay; there was death here, we were trespassing on a world that was meant to stay locked in time. 

We walked slowly, silence becoming our footsteps so unlike our usual rush through a town all bombast and sprints towards shelter. There was no laughter of children, no birdsong symphony, just our heartbeats in our ears and abandoned homes whispering secrets in a language neither of us could interpret. 

Voices began to echo from the distance, growing louder on their approach, and, before I could even react, Dominic was pulling me towards an empty stable where we came to kneel behind the door.

‘I thought the forcefield was around us?’ I asked, quickly looking from him to the road and back again.

‘It is, but I don’t want to take any chances. Nothing is safe here.’

A group of men came into view, cloaked in silver armor with shields strapped tightly to their arms. In the center of each shield was a signia that seemed vaguely familiar, perhaps once or twice in history classes.

‘What’s that symbol?’

‘The seal of the Holy See... _Tribunal del Santo Oficio_ -’

I interrupted his broken Spanish with an alarmed whisper. _‘The Inquisition?’_

He said nothing, just kept staring straight ahead at the soldiers speaking casually with one another. Guilt laced itself through his ears in the form of a blush, and I became sick with a panic that flowed rapidly through my veins. 

‘Dominic, what the hell are we doing here?’

‘The men who are after me - the members of the Tempara Ministrum - are less likely to breach important historical events. Our interference could eradicate the fabric of time.’

‘So you just dragged me into one of the most volatile points of time for sport?’

‘To buy us time!’

‘It looks like you’ve bought us death! We need to get out of here before they or Tempora Whatever men find us. I genuinely don’t know which fate is worse.’

He leaned forward, pressing me against the door with his mouth set in a hard line. Resting his forehead against mine, he shut his eyes and spoke slowly with more assertive ascendency than I had ever heard from him.

‘Walk slow, walk quiet. Do your best not to disrupt the air.’

I couldn’t even reply before he kissed my head and lifted me from the ground by my hand. I followed his rules, sticking close to his side and keeping his pace. But what did it matter, I thought, if I walked quietly at all, since the beating of my heart and the volume of my anxiety would surely give everything away? 

The soldiers spoke with laughter in their mother tongue, the topic of discussion seemingly casual as though they were entirely nonplussed by the hollow emptiness of the small town. I wondered if they spoke of torture, of heretics and thieves; or perhaps they spoke of their families and their Sunday meals, as if nothing of any other import were happening around them. 

I wanted to hate them and blame them, but I’d learned my history and knew they had their orders, knew they’d be hunted if they didn’t obey the Papacy. 

They had their orders and I had mine. 

We passed them without issue, and I squeezed Dominic’s hand in a silent celebration. I kept my gaze pointed straight ahead, but from the corner of my eye I saw him glance down at me with the smile that turned my heart to liquid gold. 

But then I felt the breeze on my back, a too violent wind for casual stroll or the laughter of men, and turned back expecting the slash of metal only to see a cold steel visor and a gun in its place. 

I was dragged along behind Dominic, caught off guard by how quickly had realized we’d been found without turning his head, towards a woods behind a small series of homes. Without a proper start, the terrain challenged my balance and I found it difficult to keep up with Dominic as I tripped over branches he so elegantly cleared with single jumps. 

‘Dom, you need to slow up!’ I shouted, breath hot in my chest.

‘It’s fine! Just keep moving, we’ll be out of here soon.’

He was panting, scared just as I was and it helped me feel less alone in my panic. 

‘Just think of somewhere to go, now, please!’

He cut a turn quickly around a pile of logs arranged for a burning, a bonfire meant for human remains, and the swiftness with which he turned forced my hand from his grip. I collapsed in a heap onto a bed of leaves and twigs, and I crawled on my hands and knees toward his distant feet.

‘Dominic!’ I screamed.

He turned his head sharply before he disappeared completely. 

The thud of boots, the clanking of armor.

I was alone.

No forcefield to protect me.

An accomplice to a thief, a visual heretic. There was no time travel here, no science or technology in this world that would save me. All I had were my hands and my feet.

All I could do, without fanfare or the expectation of a new land, was really, truly run.


	2. Chapter 2

**Unknown, 1484-85  
Teruel, Kingdom of Aragon, Spain**

The members of the Ministry disappeared behind me as soon as Dominic vanished, their interest in me evidenced by how quickly they left me behind. 

They never came back for me, neither for questioning nor for an execution. 

Instead they left me for dead at the hands of an army so skilled in psychological and physical torture that I took to breaking myself down before they could get their hands on me. I ran from town to town, palms sweating and chest burning with each run. Every burning city I entered held a brief promise of security, empty houses containing discarded scraps of food, piss soaked beds to sleep in, and torn clothing of men hauled off to jail cells below the earth. Some homes contained weapons, discarded daggers and knives I strapped to my belt with leather strings. It took practice to cut my hair without clipping part of my ears in the process. I wore scars on the side of my head, self-inflicted and only half healed.

Three weeks was all it took before I killed a man. I told myself it was survival, that he would have killed me, that this was my life now. This was a war between God and men, and if men could command time and temporality there was no longer a difference - we were all equal here. His life left his eyes before my dagger left his side, blood hot and thick on my fingers as if to burn straight through my bones. I held him close while he struggled, spasming violently until he stilled, collapsing against my chest like a spent lover. I held him while I cried through grit teeth, understanding that it was easy, easier than I thought it would be, and this would not be the first time I held mortality in my hands. I walked along a river bank until sundown, not wanting to clean my hands until the stain on my skin became a tattoo. They were sticky for days. 

Patience was never one of my virtues, my past life so filled with endless noise begging for my attention that stillness always seemed irrational in the modern world. Time had become tangible, something I had run through, and between, and after six months the slowness of running through days in my own, displaced life became a natural thing. I’d grown accustomed to waiting, the fear of absence no longer rust in my veins. The cold and the fear of longing had given way to a love that filled me with heat; expectation had become a dream of an oncoming pleasure, and when it was over I would always be filled with disappointment. 

I stopped telling myself he would come back soon, ceased a morning ritual of bathing and whispering today is the day. Eventually the memory of him blurred, becoming just footprints on the wind and a phantom limb in a cold bed. 

Mine had become a tempered reality filled with false heroism and the saving of tyrannical children from a sacrilegious death. The violence of this new life suited me fine, and I wore the blood and the armor with a chest puffed full of regret. My nose no longer seared from the stench of burning flesh, my eyes didn’t bat at the corpses piled high or the homes reduced to ash. I’d seen towns fall and women bleed, I tasted war on the air and swallowed it whole. The sight of a sword ripping through a man no longer made me ache with recoil, only made my knuckles tense with disdain. The hatred of men had become commonplace and, until he came back, until I was pulled back and taught how to run without the clanking of metal behind me, the act of loving was nothing but a distant, surreal dream. 

When winter came I skinned rabbits and learned to sew, stitching their uncleaned fur into the lining of my shirt and boots. I walked through ice and snow, from town to town, taking a drink in each but never staying long enough to bring them harm. I was a wanted man, a heretic for believing in nothing except that time was continuous, that this genocide would happen again, and that if Dom could touch time then he was somehow touching me. 

When the trees of the forest of Aragon began to emerge from their slumber, the shade of their bark taking a ruddy complexion rather than the pale brown of death, I saw him standing not too far down the path I walked on. Like a pine shaking loose its nettles, I shivered at the sight of him and paused. I’d imagined his presence countless times and, while I was fully aware he was no premonition, that my mind had long since given up imagining his visage once it had been almost completely forgotten, I felt little excitement at all.

He ran to me, his face unchanged and golden, all smiles and stable breaths. I felt myself begin to seethe, the scars along my neck heating with blood for the first time in months.

‘I found you...what’s happened to you?’ All joy faded from his voice as he took me in. I hoped he would drink his fill, that he would see what he made me, that I had become this for him. 

I remained silent, watching the way his gaze traveled down my body, expression becoming mangled with horror that made his jaw twitch. And only after he returned his eyes to mine, after I finally saw his nostrils flare in confusion and hurt did I take my turn to speak. 

‘What the _fuck_ took you so long?’ I was a venomous thing, and I wondered if he would ever learn to love a snake.

His brow furrowed and he barely hesitated his response, falling over his words like a small child. ‘Took me - it’s been two hours!’

‘Two hours?’ I shouted, unconcerned with giving away my position. ‘It’s been over a year!’

I counted one thousand thoughts that ran behind his eyes, the only place his guard had never reached. I expected tears or rage, guilt, regret, every emotion I had ever seen him offer me, but instead, to my shock and my rage, he gave me understanding. 

‘So this is what happened to you...’ he began, slowly. ‘When I met you, you were raw and hard, not the soft teenager I met in the library. This was the year that turned you.’

In the wake of his words, I felt myself rear back. No longer merely a thief, he had become a liar. 

‘There’s blood under your fingernails,’ he offered gently, eyes focused on my left hand which remained weaponless. 

‘There’s more than blood under my nails,’ I said, voice cold. ‘You don’t send a man to the Inquistion and expect a boy to come back.’

‘You were always a soldier. I wondered what made you this way, all these years. You would never tell me.’

‘The details are in history books, where they belong,’ I countered. ‘My version is too stained with blood and vomit to be legible.’ 

‘What’s -’

I cut him off, blinded by questions and anger. I wanted to scream I had the right, the right was mine, to be the Inquisitor at this point. My feelings were valid, I wanted to shout. This right was mine because I felt it. It was mine because I lived it. 

‘Run me somewhere safe. Run me somewhere that feels like home.’

**31 December, 2012  
New York, New York**

The world built itself around us in a haze of black and white. When the colours started to seep in, the noise of the Earth became vibrant and loud. Everything felt distant and familiar, though I was overcome by the shock of noise from car horns and voices on the streets. There was concrete beneath my feet and smog in the air, high rise buildings and the lights of modernity lifting their arms into the sky. I coughed several times, my lungs used to an uncontaminated atmosphere.

‘When are we?’ I asked once I was able to speak.

‘New Years Eve, 2012,’ he said softly. Dominic stood next to me, facing out to the street as he watched cars pass. He clutched my hand tightly, perhaps afraid I’d break off and run from him once our feet had touched the ground.

‘Where?’ My voice was flat and exhausted.

‘New York.’

‘I need clothes.’ I slipped my hand from his, ignoring his small whine of protest, to pull the thick tunic from my chest. It reeked of dirt, blood and vomit. I could smell myself on the wind and I scowled. Water had began to leak into my boots, the snow melting through, making my feet go numb. ‘What time is it?’

‘Just half six.’ Dominic finally turned to me, hope smeared all over his face. He was waiting for the fallout, my fallout. 

‘Shops should still be open.’ I started walking down the street towards bright lights and a crowd of people.

‘You don’t have any money,’ he said, rushing to catch up to me.

‘I’m used to stealing.’ 

We had a forcefield to keep us safe, I no longer had morals. I was safe.

I was safe. 

~~~~~

We snuck into the Macy’s on 34th Street just as the last customers were beginning to leave. Dominic followed behind me in silence, hot on my heels and anxious to his core. The questions burned in my throat like bile, but I’d lived a full year without pandering to his acquiescence and my priorities had changed. I needed clothing, food, things vital to my survival as a person. I’d built myself into a beast, and only with racks of finely pressed shirts and soft denim surrounding me did I remember that I was a man born into polite society. 

I stripped out of my clothes, not bothering to shield myself from Dominic. He didn’t bother to turn around. Instead he watched me peel the clothes from my skin, dried dirt and blood peppered on my flesh having been there for countless days. Hygiene had been a luxury, a difficult luxury to find in the cold months of winter. The water had just started to raise its temperature when Dominic decided to show his face.

Pulling shirts off of hangers, I walked down the aisles naked and without care. Once the silence became oppressive and my tongue burned with betrayal, I started to speak. 

‘You didn’t come back for me.’ Questions had become statements. It was all I could manage.

Leaning against a large white pillar that held a mirror, Dominic pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and began to speak in shaking tones.

‘I wanted to,’ he said. ‘You have no idea how badly I wanted to, but I couldn’t come back right away. It would have been too obvious.’

‘They don’t care about me. They aren’t after me.’

‘I -I didn’t know...I needed to keep you safe.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘I know, I’m -’

‘Don’t say you’re sorry,’ I said flatly, pulling on a pair of soft denim jeans. I didn’t bother to seek out boxers to wear under them. ‘I mean nothing to the men after you. You had to cover your own ass.’

‘Can you blame me?’ he sighed.

‘Yes,’ I said, flashing him a glare. ‘I can.’ 

‘And what would you have had me do, Matt?’ The lilt of exasperation in his voice was exhilarating. I needed this confrontation, I needed to hear him break. Pushing him to the edge was the only way I’d get a deluge of honesty out of him. ‘Risk both of us getting captured and sent back to 3418 just to die? I can’t do that again!’

There he was again, spewing more secrets and mysteries my way as though they would placate my dissatisfaction. I whirled around and walked towards him until my nose was inches from his. He was the ice of a winter storm that fed the fire in my veins. I wanted to kill him or kiss him, bleed him beneath my tongue, fill the ache in my heart with him, and run from him all at once. I couldn’t trust him, but I loved him, and through all my fragile expectations in a lost year, the breath from his parted lips said more about his loss than mine.

‘You have lied to me so many times.’ My voice was low, trembling with a rage that turned my fisted knuckles white. ‘How many people have you done this with? How many people have you dragged backwards and forwards through time just to leave them to die?’

‘None. Matt, you have to let me-’

‘You left me in a Medieval Holocaust, Dominic! I’m not me anymore!’ 

There was nothing left of me for him to love. I was a shattered, frayed ghost of a boy that had been soaked in sin. I was no longer fresh faced or warm, able to love him back to safety or even able to tell him we would be ok. I was not fine. We would never be fine. 

‘You are exactly who I expected you to be!’ he shouted. ‘You, in this moment, are exactly the person I thought I’d found in the library!’

‘For once,’ I screamed, voice scratching, ‘can you give me the entire fucking truth without sparing me the details?’

‘I met you when I was 20, Matt!’ He placed his hands on either side of my face, same tightness and ferocity as the day we met. ‘You were always older than me, smarter, and distant like you’d seen war and every inch of a history I just didn’t have access to. Matt, I was 20. I’m 46 now and you, this you is the man I met as a boy and fell in love with. I’ve seen all of you now, only in the wrong order.’ 

When he finished speaking he released my face and backed away, panting like he’d run a marathon. There was nothing I could do while I processed his words, so I just watched him, eyes wide and jaw clenched tight, as he ran his arm beneath his nose to wipe either sweat or tears or both. 

‘Half my life has been wrapped up in you...two whole timelines have been filled with you,’ he finished. 

I breathed, long, deep, and slow, for several minutes trying to understand his history - my future. I shut my eyes, and tried to think.

‘Where am I in your timeline? The man you met, not the boy you found.’

‘You ran with me after I stole the key. I watched them kill you in front of our city center...they made an example out of you so everyone would be willed to find me.’

Everything went cold, all blood in me stilled. Death was inevitable. Suddenly I understood his careful treading, the Ministry’s disinterest. Value and place meant everything to one, and nothing to some. I was as good as a stolen key. 

‘So that’s why they don’t want me.’ My words came as a hollow whisper. ‘They already know my fate.’ Even as I spoke, I began to formulate plans and strategies, ways to fight and ways to live. 

He sighed heavily, quivering and tired. I finally was able to see him as an old and fractured man.‘You went willingly to them...I guess you already knew how we would end.’

‘Why...didn’t you ever tell me?’ I asked, finally bringing myself to approach him. 

‘What, that I knew everything about you before you’d actually become the person I knew?’

‘No! That you’d known about me and this since we met! I’ve been running with you for what feels like forever and -’

It was his turn to cut me off, voice crumbling under his evaporating resolve. ‘And I’ve been in love with you for what feels like forever, because our whole relationship has stretched an eternity!’ 

‘Don’t tell me you’ll love me forever.’ My voice came quiet and resolute, silencing him and all his echoing protests. I continued to walk towards him, inching slowly onto the tile with bare feet. I welcomed the chill as I wrapped my arms around his waist and stared him, looked at him as one soldier to another. Eventually, he followed suit and stared me down with equal conviction. ‘Forever bores me, forever is scattered and non-linear. Forever doesn’t hold me like you are, right now. I care about today, this moment. Give me the present and make that stretch onwards. That’s how you tell someone you love them. You give them the present and you refuse to let it die.’ 

He came to my mouth with a vengeance, pulling me to him to drip loss and anguish down into my soul through the force of his tongue. I clawed at him violently, pulling at the cotton of his shirt like a caged and desperate animal. We were never one for slow or gentle coupling, sex for us was always a violent affair. It was in our habit to tear through one another as we tore through time, with lust and purpose and power. 

He licked the scars of my neck clean and I bit the sides of his jaw with sharp teeth and swollen lips. I’d missed his body with a same rage I felt for the way I’d missed his voice, the way he held on to words as though he were reluctant to let them go. 

And as we fucked beneath the law, in a locked down building as countless strangers celebrated on the streets below, I began to wear my warrior scars with pride. Dom had come back in time to change the history of the world, and I’d seen the change. I had played a hand in the manipulation of history and events, and if it could be changed, if we were the men set about the Earth to change its fate, then so would I change mine. This is not how I was meant to die, neither willingly nor so early. 

I would not hand myself over to a Ministry that did not govern me or my path. I would fight and I would change.

My fate was not theirs to control or to know so arrogantly.

_My fate was not theirs._


	3. Chapter 3

**1 January, 2013  
New York, New York**

It felt unusual to let the dawn swallow me whole in the silence of a safe building. I hadn’t slept, merely spent the entire evening imagining soldiers and priests coming towards me through racks of clothing, feeling my toes twitch, making to flee without the action fully reaching my legs. It felt unusual to watch the sky turn from dark blue to pale orange through a large window, no longer staring upwards through a burned rooftop or an open field. Familiarity was cold earth and limitless uncertainty, not a hard chest and a warm hand upon my own. I was awkward in the closeness, my arms and legs held too tightly to be truly relaxed. Memories flooded my head of how we used to lay together, bound in a heap of limbs and ecstasy, and all I felt was a hollow sense of longing for a time when joy and love came easy, without the oncoming wave of loss and loneliness. 

He knew I was awake. I could feel his eyes on me as he stroked my hair, pulling at the strands with the tips of his fingers as he lifted dirt from the roots. There was an expectation hanging thick in the air, his back stiff with it all as he waited and waited for the words he wanted me to say, perhaps needed me to say, words I simply couldn’t give him.

He’d told me that I’d died, that he’d watch me give in, and over, to a government that was thirsty for an example, for the blood of an innocent, control by way of fear. Experience of the human condition should have governed that I would be grappling with denial, perhaps even acceptance, and I wanted to offer him soft, pretty words about how I’d be ok, how I wouldn’t let it happen. I wanted to give him tears, too, wanted to show him that I was scared and that I could be a needy, fragile thing that wasn’t ready to die, not ready to leave him on his own. 

I wanted to be human for him, but I’d lived a year in the palm of death’s hands, had been prepared to die since I spat leaves and ash from my mouth the day he left me. Death was my only companion, the only thing that held my hand and remained a comfort in my lost year, and looking it in the face once more felt like a natural, carnal desire. 

‘I remember trying to make you soft,’ he whispered, barely audible and to himself. ‘You were only gentle when it came to me, smiled because I made you smile. I spent years trying to fix you, trying to make you show others what you showed only to me...now I realize I was fixing the damage I had done.’ 

‘I don’t want you to think of me as damaged,’ I said, unwilling to move to look at his face. My voice made his body jerk in surprise, and I allowed myself a small smirk. ‘I’m not broken, I didn’t crumble, I survived.’ 

‘But at what cost?’ 

A cavernous restraint wove itself into his voice, brimming over with remorse, regret, and stigma turned inward. Had he been a man less war-torn, the chest upon which I rested might have clenched together as he spoke, cleaving to a sob he couldn’t bear to release. Had he been a different sort of man, less scarred by his own actions, he might have worn his indiscretions as armor. But he was Dominic, and he was mine, and instead he let his confessions filter into the air just to watch them dissolve, neither learning nor changing, simply reminding himself of the better part of me, the man I left behind and the man I had become. 

‘I don’t blame you,’ I grunted. ‘I don’t blame you, but I don’t forgive you.’ 

Life had become a game of reconciliation between ourselves, a game that held neither a winner nor a loser, just endless revolutions of ruin. 

‘I’m not asking you to.’ Forgiveness was a thing meant to be earned, not taken at will, and so long as he questioned his own deservedness he hardly expected me to offer such a gift freely.

‘Why don’t we just run to wherever this key originated?’ The question had been bothering me for ages, spinning at the back of my mind over the course of a year, perhaps planting itself the moment we started running. ‘You haven’t been running towards anything, just from everything including consequence.’ 

Every location we went to, every moment in history, had become a stopover - a means of avoidance of cause and effect. He was a ripple pulling away from the tear he’d caused.   
‘There’s ministry members stationed where, and when, they know I’d have to go or originate in.’ A heavy sigh filtered through his words, giving them more weight than I’d expected. ‘Two coming for me, twelve waiting for me.’ 

They’d planned around him, turning time into a target and its epicenter the bull’s eye. As a group defined by their intelligence and mastery of temporality, it made sense they’d be waiting at ground zero for his arrival. If running was simply a distraction to buy himself time, he’d bought himself centuries worth of open ended pipe dreams and sore knees. Every action we had been taking was enacted from a purely subjective point of view. Our choices and our plans revolved around the use of an object, of man using the key as a source of historic entropy. 

Nothing is born of nothing. There is never an effect without a cause, every end has a start. If the end was a fixed point of history, so would be the beginning. 

‘What if this wasn’t about time, though?’ I pulled myself from his grasp, turning slightly to lean upon my hands to look at him. ‘What if it was timing.’ 

He fixed me with a confused, foggy expression as he tried to piece together my implication, mist glazing over his eyes as he coursed through various interpretations. 

‘You mean seconds before the collapse?’ The sharpness in his tone became borderline sarcastic, and I fought back a growl. ‘Destroy it before it gets put in? I think the ministry has already thought of that.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head quickly. ‘That’s too obvious. Originate at the conception of the idea.’

‘How would -’

‘Listen! You go in before the end, right? Just for days before the chaos, and then find the notes.’ I lifted myself to stand, my thoughts coursing through my synapses and making my whole body drunk with purpose. ‘If a key is being developed, like a weapon or a machine, there have to be blueprints, sketches; an archive of change. They have to date the idea. Find the notes and go to the day they figure it out, prevent them from doing so.’

From the floor, his eyes passed over my body, searching from side to side as I spoke and he fought his own interjections. After I finished speaking, I raked a hand through my hair, choking on my heartbeat as he rose to stand over me, pale and sick with the notion of finality. 

‘We’d have minutes, maybe less, to find it.’ I’d never heard him so quiet, not when we were alone, not unless he was telling me to run. He was being swallowed, by something buried within himself, something he was trying not to show me. ‘The entire location, forwards and backwards in time, has become a hotspot. It’s too volatile.’ 

Blinking felt like a betrayal, so I kept my eyes wide as I spoke, ‘For one person, maybe, but not two.’

His inhale sounded like a hiss, and I found myself clinging to the sound like a depraved child. The noise pornographic and horrible all at once. 

‘Just because I told you I saw you die,’ he said slowly, sternly, ‘doesn’t mean that can’t be changed. You’re still here, it’s not happened. Not yet. I’m not going to let you become reckless.’ 

I turned from him, not wanting to truly address him or confront the truth that my life had been an endless series of thoughtless choices, a whirlwind of nonchalance and carelessness. 

‘I’ve already been reckless. Running away with you was reckless,’ I said, bending to pick up the clothes I had discarded the night before. The jeans, soft as ever, felt a little more natural after waking up in a world where they belonged...where I belonged. 

I felt him walk a few steps toward me, the breeze of his actions carrying his scent on the wind. The air was filled with the noise of his thoughts, his hesitation and his apprehension.

‘You know if we’re successful,’ he said, tightly, ‘you and I won’t meet. We’ll never have met one another. I wouldn’t have had any reason to run.’

There it was. The sacrifice, the cost of the earth. We were the scale meant to tip. My fingers froze their actions of buttoning my shirt, my lips parted slightly as I stared straight ahead into nothingness. Early morning had given the shop an amber glow, honey liquid crawling up the walls, making me feel stuck in place. 

We had to move, had to breakaway. Our choices would stick to the amber like flypaper, turning us into fossils of an alternate life. 

I turned to him, crestfallen yet proud. 

‘If we’re successful, we stop the end of the world.’

‘I never said it was the end of the world, just the end of the world as you know it to exist.’ He shuffled on his feet and I could see the storm brewing behind his eyes. Always quick to temper, always fire to temper my ice. It was my turn to lick the flame. 

‘Do you know how many lives I’ve taken?’ I was loud and unforgiving. ‘How many men I’ve killed?’

‘I don’t - I don’t know,’ he said, looking away from me.

I approached him swiftly, turning his face back to mine with my hand on his cheek. There was war in my eyes, and no sign of surrender in his. ‘The point isn’t the number, Dominic. The point is that I shouldn’t have to ask this question, or even have the number be scaled at one. I’ve taken so many lives, Dom, and now we have the opportunity to save millions. We can’t be selfish about this, not now.’ 

Placing one hand on his cheek felt somehow wrong, as if I were being unkind or unjust in not offering him symmetry, so I placed the other on his opposite cheek and felt as though his very gaze imbued me with importance. I had become him, held his existence between my hands as he so often did mine, understood how any conversation with weight or tense emotions always seemed better held when we were touching.

‘The truth is that you won’t miss me, and I won’t miss you. I won’t miss you because I won’t know you, I never will. But I love you right now, in this life, in this present. I love you in this fixed moment in time, when we decide the world is ours, that history can bend to our will. We’ve had a thousand infinities stuck between centuries of life and death. I love you enough to help save your future. I love you enough to make sure that we’re both happy, in some when. I love you enough to never love you at all.’ 

His forehead bent to rest on mine, his eyes closed as though he were prepared to scream, or cry, or pray. 

‘I love you enough to leave us here, and live a future without you,’ he whispered. 

**4 August, 2067  
Aggregate Resource Center, Bin Seoul, Korea**

It was six months before the collapse, and already everything was silent. The Earth itself seemed to refuse its inhale, forbidding all natural noise and ambience from penetrating the area. I shivered in the stillness, just to hear the creaking of my bones. Bizarre, that the source of the world’s destruction was born in a building which resembled a corporate banking office, rising high into the sky with modern glass gleaming in daylight. Concrete walkways were lined with cherry blossom trees as if to say ‘Everyone is welcome here. Everyone is safe.’ Built with Russian and Middle Eastern money, born of North Korean efficiency, the beauty of the building was a farce, the mask of a fully functional death trap. 

If I were to have lived my life in a linear pattern, lived through chronological order without disruptions, I would have been alive to watch alliances live and die between countries. In this somewhat imminent future, a force of otherwise unassociated political figureheads had joined together to form an alliance based on a singular common goal: nuclear oblivion. After North Korea had rejoined the South in the wake of a violent war that decimated most of its overall population, the newly aligned country formulated plans to build a research center whose sole purpose was the development, and construction, of weaponry designed to rearrange the global map. Struggling financially in its post-war state, it received funding for its build from both Russia and a series of newly wealthy countries in the Middle East, who only recently could make such claims after a twenty year oil war. 

Before me stood the fruits of the money, the effort, the bloodshed. The headquarters of the end of the world, and we were meant to erase it from the inside out.

We walked around the perimeter, several feet apart and with quick steps in fear of being prematurely discovered. The goal was to peer through windows, gain a sense of the building’s entry foyer, offices, and labs. Most windows were tinted, their darkness shrouding the inner workings of the building itself, but the far east side of the building held a wing of administrative offices decorated with modern couches and sleek marble. A vase of lilies on a table had caught my attention, white and vital and untainted. Before I could truly gain a sense of the building, Dominic’s hand was on my wrist and I was inside the building, in an unmarked hall, on an unknown floor. 

‘I needed to see the interior to phase in. We have two minutes.’

He moved in front of me with a confidence that gave me cause for alarm, running as though he knew exactly where he was meant to go, as though he’d been there before. My fingers tingled when he released my hand, letting me go to propel himself by the force of his own will.

‘What we need will be at the center of the building, underground. Guarded by metal walls.’

I bit back my protests and my questions for the sake of our mission; it wasn’t the time nor the place to talk or plan. Action was the order of the day, strengthened only by trust. I followed blindly with only marginal confidence and a heart ready to be broken. 

Down endless halls, whitewashed and sterile, we ran until we came to an elevator. Though the floor remained uncrowded, we pressed ourselves into the corner as we rode the lift down seventeen floors to make room for occupants. A single, unfamiliar touch could ruin everything, so we hid in the shadows, backs of our hands touching as a sort of cheap reassurance that everything would be fine. 

As people came and went, I struggled to see them as villains. They were building oblivion, following directions and instructions written by men or women, superiors with their own orders, and it was only then that I realized history would repeat itself, from the Inquisition to the end of days, because the only thing that remained true was humanity thrived on tearing one another apart if they believed the blame could be shifted. 

The doors opened to reveal a dome shaped room, built and coated with metal. In the center sat a large orb, connected to the ground by a thin platform extending to the walls around its whole circumference. It resembled, in a way, a planetarium, ready to open from its top and let light spill in. I assumed just the: opposite was meant to occur, open from the top to let entropy pour out. From where I stood, I could just make out an empty cylinder in the center of the dome, empty and waiting for something to fill it. 

‘Key goes in there, yeah?’ I asked, nodding in the direction I was facing.

‘Yes. Matt,’ he turned to me, then, facing me with a flush on his cheeks that frightened me. Guilt was the only time he would flush, never fear.

‘What’s - what have you done?’ I was angry with his lies and quiet, deceitful way of protecting my frayed innocence.

He ignored my question completely, instead he took my hand and placed the gun he always had held close to his side in the palm of my right hand. I stared at it, open mouthed and doe-eyed, swallowing his silent meaning like a bitter pill.

‘Use it only as a means of intimidation. Do not, under any circumstances, pull the trigger.’ 

I thought about the function of a gun, of its role throughout history and what it would mean to kill a person in the future. Weapons were meant to make a person bleed, turn their reality to ash and sweep it away without a second thought. Blade was meant to cut, bullet was meant to bury itself inside a person and eat them alive. I held in my hands a gun meant to break time and remove a person completely, from this moment and the next. The only conclusion that I could come to was that the gun he carried was designed to split atoms and send a person back to the Big Bang as Carbon, Nitrogen, and dust. 

‘When we get in there,’ he said, gesturing towards a door that lead to the dome, ‘I’m taking down the field because we need to search drawers and cabinets. If they open on their own, it will be suspicious. If I don’t find what I’m looking for in one minute, you come to me and we leave.’

Acid started to tear at my throat, and I wondered if I was truly ready to sacrifice everything to save a world I didn’t belong in. 

We could be happy, living out life without numbers or chronology, bodies aging without calendars or days relative to one another for anniversaries or birthdays. An unmarked life for a love that wove itself through time. 

‘What will I do?’ I spat the words out, still staring at the gun, at my unshaking hand. 

He tilted my head up to face him, no storm in his eyes just a hollowed, empty cavern where his emotions used to sit.

‘Scare them.’

Dominic broke away from me, running into the lab without kissing me, without giving me one last breath of air to fill my lungs. My legs carried me behind him, my brain not fully offering its consent merely accepting that I had to return to beast form, that the war in me was part of who I was, and that if blood was meant to be spilled today, it would not be ours. 

He made for the desk of a scientist, pushing him away from his work with a strength he rarely administered. My boy had become battalion and I was his brigade. But the scientist, and others around him, quickly fell into chaos, charging for Dominic as though their intellect was every match for brawn, and before they could make for an alarm, I rounded on the scientist, neither innocent nor guilty, and pressed the gun to his head like ice to a fever.

‘I wouldn’t.’ My voice carried in an echo around the room, resonating for several seconds in the dome before fading on a lilt. 

I dragged the man to the center of the room, his hands around my forearm digging in the hopes of drawing blood. As I stood midway up a steel ramp that lead towards the machine, I reminded myself that I had felt this pain before. This was nothing. This was not a year. In thirty-seconds, this would be over. 

‘My colleague and I don’t want to cause anyone harm,’ I shouted. ‘But do not mistake our benevolence for complacency. If you want destruction, we will give it to you.’

In the seconds after I spoke, everything felt like gold upon my tongue, the gleaming tides of history building its axis around me. I had compelled everyone in the room with a fear that gave their hands, feet, and minds pause. Dominic, in all his tired glory, was sifting through papers with an ease that made the moment, that single moment, feel triumphant.

But time never truly belonged to us, and so the gold of my false hope rusted deep and brown the moment Dominic, panicked and frantic as his synapses descended to chaos, shouted, ‘I can’t find it! There’s nothing here!’ 

Perhaps it was his admission of his cause, or perhaps it was the falter of the iron in my jaw that made the room erupt, but it took only seconds for a stranger, unimportant and ivory in their white coat, to feel, maybe for the first time in their life, the heat of bravery course through their spine. He lunged at Dominic, a shard of glass from a broken beaker held tightly in his hand fully prepared to force it into his neck. My hand, unwavering in its loyalty, turned the gun from my captive’s head to the other scientist’s, my body naming him a traitor, a villain, a murderer by intent. 

Swords had been my weapon by necessity, but when killing comes naturally to a person the method of choice so rarely outweighs the capability for precision and stale taste of contrived remorse. 

And so I pulled the trigger with a twitch of my index finger, waiting for the splatter of blood after the screams of men and women, but no such splatter came. There was no bullet to leave my barrel, just streams of colour and atomic makeup winding itself back together to reveal a pale blue, liquid pillar built into a metal casing. 

It dropped to the floor unceremoniously with a clang that made my ears sting, and I remained frozen in place as Dom screamed and a woman crawled toward the object, unafraid and knowing. He tried to run towards it, but suddenly everything froze, the air in the room becoming tight and unbreathable. 

Two ministry members appeared behind Dominic, grabbing hold of him by the arms as he tried to break free. I let go of my captive and ran to try to help, but I was shot with a band of orange light that left me winded and unable to move forward. Sound meant nothing to me in our metal cavern, my ears ringing as though I had gone deaf. They pulled the glass plate from Dom’s arm and let it drop to the floor, my arms reaching for him and it like an infant bound in their seat. 

The weight of things settled in me, dragging my spirit into the depths of the earth, deeper underground than we had gone. 

Dominic, in the arms of his executioners, disappeared before my eyes leaving me free to fall back onto the ramp in a heap of constricted agony. Time continued, the woman reached her destination while I kept my eyes on Dominic’s plate. She touched and caressed the pillar as if god himself had offered it to her as a gift. 

Of course she would, because it was the answer they had been seeking.

Dominic couldn’t find the draft because there was no draft. They had no answer, not until we brought it to them. We were the key. _We were not the heroes, the saviours of the earth, we were the harbingers._


	4. Chapter 4

**4 August, 2067  
Ppalgang Sup (Red Forest), Bin Seoul, Korea**

The Earth likes to eat itself; it hollows out its caves, rips canyons wide to make its own void, brings mountains to their knees. The Earth eats itself, preparing to implode and it brings us all with it. 

The Earth was eating itself and the earth was eating me. 

I had convinced myself that I was prepared for loss and death because I’d lived with those risks woven deep into my spine without him, I’d been to war and back, bled deep into the snow of a cold winter from cracked hands and split lips. In my own eyes, I was a battalion and I was hungry for victory. His grand return had unwillingly placated my sense of consequence, dulled the sense of loneliness and the inherent selfishness that comes with abandonment. Without him, loss and death were my own, errors and mistakes in the chaos of battle meant the loss of my own life, punishment for my own carelessness, never the loss of something I held dear because I had already lost it. 

It was different, this time, because it wasn’t a miscalculation of distance or speed, it wasn’t a misjudgement of connection, he hadn’t left me for a field of escape. This time, he was taken. I watched him lose his only means of escape as it was torn from his arm and reached into nothingness only to see him vanish. This time, there was no fault, only the weight of failure crippling my lungs. 

Several seconds passed before I forced myself from the ground, pushed knowledge, guilt, and greed into the back of mind for the purpose of survival. The noise of the laboratory became a cacophony of confusion, wonder, and fear all echoing at the same volume with the same vibrancy. There was no distinguishing one wail of terror from a shout for security, so I blocked it all out with my own mental voice. I had my goals, I had my purpose: get Dominic’s arm band, find him, save him, live. 

And so I ran. I hauled myself to my feet, and ignored the tears that stung my eyes with grit teeth. I pushed myself forward and lunged for the glass plate while others made moves for me, doors and locks, the key we had given them because they needed us to give it to them. They were no match for neither my speed nor my will, their hands grasping at my jacket only for me to slip it off. The truth was that I was trained for this, bred for this. I’d run to infinity and back, while they only theorized the possibility. I was the proof beyond the theorem. There was no stopping me. 

I sprinted, glass plate in hand, until the fire in me soaked through my muscles, breathing ragged and labored like acid. I found myself in a woods, thick and brittle against the gloaming of the sky. Beauty had laced itself through nature, between blossoming trees and a soft forest floor covered in mossed logs and unfamiliar foliage. Strange that the end of the world would begin here, against the belly of creation. 

Unable to move any further, I leaned against a tree and slid to a squat, eyes pressed tightly closed as my thoughts started to swim. I’d dealt with the silence of a forest before, but had forgotten how to still the rampant ocean waves of my thoughts. The death of the universe was brought by my hand, ignorant and accidental yet still naming me a killer at a global scale. I brought death and destruction, was the unintentional warden of a futuristic prison that meant there would be no hope, no escape, neither for humanity nor myself. 

It seemed inappropriate to cry, for justice would be done either by the hand of an executioner or an unnamed fate waiting for me to run head first into it. Clarity consumed me; no wonder Dominic watched me die, watched my future self give myself to the law to be made an example. He’d called me innocent, but there would be no purity left in me from now to then. I was an example and a warning, telling Dominic not to run, begging him to make me a free man. Stay put. Liberate me from the guilt and hell I’ve built for you. 

And where would Dominic be now? When would he be? Had they taken his life slowly, made him suffer for his actions or had it been swift? Perhaps, if they were unkind, they would prolong the date of his execution, locked him in some kind of cell to wait out what little time he had left thinking ‘is today the day?’ Uncertainty is self-made poison for the mind, slowly turning hope to rust and rendering conviction the deluded dignity of the insane. 

But if he were alive, if they had spared his blood in favor of an isolated cage, then I still had time. 

The glass plate responded slightly to my fingers, the whirling of its colours following my tips as though begging for direction. In a distant memory, I remembered him pulling me close in an empty farmhouse, somewhere and somewhen, telling me the blue lines were the past, red the future; he was the green line and I was silver, the unintentional stowaway. Then, every colour had been wrapped together as though it were forming its own microcosmic history, merging our timelines with the past and present to give us control. Now, there was no verdant green bound to the cold metal of my life, and my world, the world locked between glass, seemed hollow because of it. 

And he’d cut me off once, telling me this plate was his whole world, telling me he needed it to survive, assuming I was going to say he talked about it as though it were everything to him. He hadn’t known me then, only a future me he’d spent half his life loving back into a boy rather than a warrior. Dominic had never seen how perceptive I was before I’d been forced into an iron-clad soldier, and where he thought I meant it was his world, I had wanted to ask if it was sentient. 

Somehow, Dominic had hacked into the device so all he had to do was think of where he wanted to go and it would take him there. Somehow, Dominic had married himself with technology, learned to love it and build his brain into a mainframe that encompassed eternity. His physical presence had been taken from me, but my hand clutched the only connection I had to his mind. 

So I thought of him, brought his face to the center of my imagination. I tasted the salt of his skin on my tongue and on the air I breathed through my open lips, imagined the texture of his hair beneath my fingers. I was forcing him back to reality, hoping that the glass would take me where I needed to go. 

_3418\. Take me to 3418. Take me to him._

And when I opened my eyes, adjusted to the darkness surrounding me, all I saw was the forest I had run to, leaves of the trees above me glowing red beneath the stars. 

‘Fuck!’ I shouted, head cocked back and eyes wide. Time had made me desperate.

I slapped my hand on the glass and talked to nothing, no one, just a glass galaxy that held too many minds and too many directions. 

‘Take me to him! I know you can.’ I was pleading with myself and with time, the spit from my mouth wetting my bottom lip and spraying to the atmosphere. It was so easy to be wet with grief, leaking prayers to a silent god. ‘3418, in a prison or a cell or something. I don’t know, just _bring me to him!_ ’

And the world was gone. 

The air went stale, the atmosphere climate controlled and cycled through a closed ventilation system making it metallic and bitter. My feet were no longer cradled by grass and dirt, rather forced onto a harsh tile that echoed with my drop. I was in a vacuum, a closed off cage where external light and sound could not penetrate. 

And then I heard him, screaming my name and sounding distant, muffled. I turned violently, taking in that everything here was black, and in the center of the room, closed off and on display, was Dominic in a large, clear cell. He was on his knees, pressed against its walls looking at me with red eyes and dried blood on his face. 

I’d found him.

**1 May, 3418  
Ministry of Historic Territories, Constellations, and Temporalities  
Voxworth, Arcova, Post-Escos**

There was no grace in the way I launched my body at the glass of his cell, sliding down to my knees to press my hands where his were. Above me, lasers displayed his name, age, crime, date of execution, which was currently unknown, in an endless beam of light.

‘What have they done to you?’ I asked, taking in the scars on his face, completely unsure if he could hear me. Clothing ripped at odd angles, wounds open and still glistening with clear moisture and dark blood. They were systematically breaking him.

‘Just questioning,’ he replied, a light smile at his shredded lips. He was being brave for me, he was being stupid.

I scowled. ‘Questioning doesn’t make you bleed.’ 

He ignored my statement altogether, brushing over it because we both knew he was not undergoing questioning. There were no interrogations here. His fate would never be so simple. Instead, he was experiencing the slow drain of his life, an unknown date of execution because he had yet to lose his will to live. They were killing him, gently coaxing his soul from the cracks in his skin and, one day, he would eventually empty himself of all vitality and become another body to be disposed of. 

His eyes fell to the glass plate discarded between my legs, matted hair falling in clumps over his eyes. He shook the strands away with a grimace, never once looking away from his prized possession. It made me jealous. I wanted his eyes on me and only me.

‘How did you - how did you get that to work?’ he asked.

‘I asked it to.’ Dominic returned his gaze to me, in shock and delight, and a proud smile stretched across my lips because this was my rescue, he was treasure I was meant to salvage, and he was pleased. ‘I asked it to find you. It’s you in there, isn’t it. Part technology, part you.’

He laughed then, understanding that I’d worked it out, that I’d worked him out ages ago. ‘I’m too connected to it for it to fully let me go.’ 

It was my turn to laugh. A small one, dark humour rising from my throat. ‘Sounds more like me, really.’

I pressed my knees closer to the glass, trying to force myself through it. My hands needed to be on him, my mouth ached for the tendons in his neck. There was a deep rooted anguish in me, a madness so clearly defined that my body yearned to crawl through to him and cling to him with red hands and white knuckles.

‘Let me touch it,’ he said, bringing his gaze back to the plate. 

‘How?’ I asked, eyes frantically searching for an opening. If I could enter...if I could get to him, we could escape. ‘There’s no -’

‘Over here.’ He stood, and nodded his head towards a circular opening. ‘There’s a gap. It’s how they give me food.’ 

Grabbing the plate, I forced myself to stand, relying on the cell to guide my exhausted body. 

They’d been feeding him, which meant time had passed and I was a late saviour. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Three days,’ he said, watching with a curious eagerness for my approach. ‘You’re very quick. Faster than I ever was.’

I slid the plate onto my arm and reached through the glass, hand grasping anxiously for him. He took my hand and held it tight in his, weaving our fingers together and bringing himself right against the glass as his other hand stroked my arm. 

‘If you can touch it we can get out of here,’ I said. Excitement was tumbling from my mouth, though I tried to remind myself that this sort of plan had been expected and hope was not meant to survive in these conditions. ‘I mean, you can tell it to take us somewhere.’

‘No.’ His answer was sharp and biting, knocking the breath from my chest. ‘This cell is rendered to prevent any and all technology from working within it. I’m in total isolation, Matt. It even gives off a frequency built to make me tired so I couldn’t fight, even if I wanted to.’

His eyes were empty, a dark grey without any storm or life behind them. Dominic was a creature undergoing evisceration. 

‘So how do I - how do I get you out of here?’ We were living in a state of urgency, and I was ready, fully prepared, to break rules and laws if it meant his safety, his survival.

‘You don’t.’

His response was so flat and final a part of me shattered under his harshness. 

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, softly, ‘there’s always a way.’

‘Not this time, Matt. I’ve reached the end of my line. Even this knows it.’ 

With calculated delicacy, he lifted his hand from the plate and spread his fingers wide, sending the strands of our life into the air. The green, his green, was a small, thin line, shorter than I’d ever seen it, diminished by the length of my silver.

‘No, no -’ 

‘It’s ok, Matt. Really. I’m not afraid to die.’ He sent the strands back into the plate and turned towards me, hand still in mine. ‘You know, most people when they say they’re scared to die aren’t actually afraid of death. People have died and come back, and they’ve all said it’s very pleasant to be dead. White light around you, being warm and safe. I’d like to be safe.’

Dominic paused, looking away from me and my moist eyes, down to the floor to gather what little pieces he had left of himself before continuing. 

‘No, people, when they’re scared of death, are actually scared of not having enough time. And Jesus, Matt, how selfish could we be if we asked for more time? We’ve had an eternity together, lost track of age and chronology altogether. I’ve had plenty of time with you.’

‘And what about me?’ I said, nearly shouting. I hated him the same way I hated him when he left me, only this time he was making the permanence known. ‘Am I meant to just go on living without you? I did that once and I don’t want to do it again.’

‘You won’t.’ This time, his two word answer was soft and fragile, as though joy were lurking around the edges of his pronounciation. 

‘What?’

‘See, it’s simple, really. I’ve always been selfish.’ He pushed himself from the glass to stand before me, something similar to pride resting on his shoulders, though I couldn’t place it. ‘I ran with time and then I ran with you because I wanted you. I told you I loved you enough to never love you at all, and that was fine, in that moment, because I’d never know the difference. We never would have met. But now...that’s really not an option for us. We ended the world and I’ll still go looking for you.’

‘You aren’t making any sense.’ I said the words even though I understood perfectly what he was getting at 

‘Time for us isn’t a line, Matt. It never was. It’s a cycle. You and me, we live in circles. We revolve around our own axis, a gravitational pull towards one another regardless of distance.’ He bit his lip, refusing to look anywhere but my eyes, and I felt small under his gaze. ‘The key was in the future because we brought it to the past. You were in the future because I put you there.’

And then he held me far away, his arm stretching from me so that there was more physical distance between us than there ever had been before. When he spoke, he spoke with strength and kindness, his neck tense with purpose.

‘You have one last mission: forgive me. Be soft for me.’ He looked at me like he always did, like I was the center of his universe, like life and time mattered because I was there with him. ‘Make me love you.’ 

He was my commanding general, delivering my orders with the conviction of a man in total awe of me, my strength, and my ability to succeed. And I wanted to kiss him, to press myself to him because I knew what he was doing, why he had been so taken with that plate of his. This would be the last time I would see him this way, older, wiser, my Virgil for the trials of my youth.

But he pushed my arm out of the gap with a force unexpected of one so broken, and I stumbled backward, the glass plate sliding off my arm as he held it tightly in his grasp, and watched him disappear, his smile bright and golden. 

**26 June, 3394  
Mer Delta Library  
Soyeisa, Neo-Britannia, Post-Escos**

Everything felt hot, like the sun was trying kiss the water from my skin without my permission. I didn’t know where he’d sent me, only felt that I would have to wait. The earth had become very flat, more like a wide desert with patches of buildings scattered around me, their distance too far to be walked. Before me stood a concrete building surrounding me with a regal sort of construction that made me feel inferior and uneducated. No matter how far I’d gone into the future, there was always an element of familiarity and simplicity, a sense of development forwards and backwards that made it easier to understand how the space around me had evolved. Here, the metal seemed to bend beneath the sun, trees grew in odd, curved patterns as though forced beyond the means of their roots. Earth was no longer earth, and I had been the cause of such destruction. 

Obeying my instincts, I sat on a white, metal bench in front of a fountain. I wondered where the water had been irrigated from, or if it was water at all. 

People passed me, no one really paying attention to my odd clothes. I was out of place in soiled jeans and a red shirt, their black fatigues so plain compared to my flamboyance. It had never occurred to me to ask Dominic why he wore such clothing, if it served some sort of elemental purpose, like to keep one cool under such a hot sun, or if they were mandatory for his rank. I assumed I’d learn.

After some time, I saw him. Small, young, and beautiful, the lines of his body still jovial and unhardened from stress. I chuckled gently, understanding why he had always been so tanned. 

He started to pass me, heading for the doors of the building in front of me, and acid rose to my throat. Dominic had placed me here, the day we were to meet, I knew, and I was meant to say something, but what? I knew too much about him, already wanted to kiss him, and restraint had started to eat away at my bones. 

As usual, Dominic did the work for me, coming to pause and rest his hands at his side briefly, feeling his pockets for something before running towards me.

I straightened my back at his approach and tried to remain calm.

‘Have you got a stylus?’ he asked, panicked. 

I smiled, absolutely no idea if the definition of such an object had changed. ‘No, I haven’t, sorry.’ I wondered if I had sounded too eager, too engaged for such a simple question.

He didn’t seem to care. ‘Fuck, my proctor is going to kill me.’

‘Taking a test?’ I asked, feeling my way through his verbal clues.

‘Yeah, my final exam.’

I smirked. ‘What are you studying?’

‘Archeology.’ He said the word proudly, smiling at himself for the work he had done, the work he would do.

I nodded. ‘I know a thing or two about archaeology.’ It was a private joke, one that filled me with longing rather than laughter.

‘Are you a professor?’ he asked, voice still hanging lilting on his pronunciation of the letter “s” the way I always adored. 

‘No,’ I chuckled. ‘Though I have a feeling I’d have a lot to talk about if I were.’

He studied me, eyes dragging over my face and clothes, something playing at his lips that looked like questions or answers, statements he wouldn’t offer me, not yet.

‘I’m going to be late...but, how long will you be here?’ His quizzical brow matched his curious voice and I wanted to offer him answers and honesty, wanted to make him smile with understanding but knew that those were locked in a different time, in different histories. 

‘A while.’

‘Good. I want to hear about what you know. Perhaps you could teach me something new.’

‘I won’t be going anywhere,’ I said, a wilt in my voice I did not intend to escape. 

He ran off, then, headed toward the doors with a speed he’d carry into adulthood. Before he reached the doors, he turned and shouted at me.

‘My name’s Dominic! I’ll be out in an hour. Don’t go anywhere.’ 

And he was off again.

‘No,’ I muttered to myself. ‘I won’t go anywhere.’

_Not without you. Never without you._


End file.
